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To all my readers, Happy New Year. Please feel free to take advantage of these special conference & expo rates (check out these low travel rates as well) as my gift to you. I hope to see you at the show January 20-22, 2010 -- a few weeks from now.

During the dotcom boom I launched a company called Infofill whose goal it was to help companies who needed content for their Web sites. As I envisioned it, every company needed to become a media company and as such needed articles, audio and eventually TV studios.

As the bubble burst, the idea morphed into over 120 sponsored news-powered channels and communities which are a major factor in the success of TMC and TMCnet.

Interestingly I turned the dotcom idea inside out to make it work and now, many companies have chosen to partner with TMC for a number of reasons such as having access to content producers, designers, SEO experts, analytics professionals and more importantly, many of our customers want to leverage the proprietary content management system we have built to optimize content dissemination to the most interested audience possible.

ITEXPO hotel rooms continue to go quickly. 11 days ago I mentioned that the hotel room block at the Loews was sold out at 106% and you needed to reserve a room quickly to get the low rate ITEXPO had negotiated. After returning from the holidays I was informed the hotel is now sold out at 131% and this news came accompanied with this message from the hotel.

Sorry for the late notice, but we will not be able to accommodate any new reservations at the ITEXPO group rate.

I often try to balance out my writing - not being too extreme in either direction and since yesterday I ended the day with a very positive piece about the billions of dollars in communications M&A transactions, today I thought it worth mentioning the decline of US patents granted to Americans. Here is an excerpt from a BusinessWeek article on the topic:

For the first time in 2009, non-Americans were granted more U.S. patents than resident inventors, accounting for 50.7% of new grants, according to recent data from the Patent & Trademark Office.

We love startups - as a society we owe them more and more each day. The contributions of Apple, WalMart, Microsoft, Google, Amazon, Intel, etc. Most companies which were not spinoffs started life as tiny babies in the enterprise pediatric ward.

In order to honor these startups and support new ones - giving them the exposure they need to get to the next level, TMC has launched in conjunction with Embrase/Larry Lisser an event called StartUp Camp Telephony. Expect this conference to give startups the exposure they need to the media, analysts, bloggers and investors.

Yesterday I touched on the Iranian takedown of Twitter and after giving more thought to the matter it makes sense to send a strong warning to my readers in the corporate, financial and government sectors that cyberattacks and terrorism have the potential to get much worse. In 2010 I recommend increasing security budgets accordingly as we can expect potentially larger and more well-coordinated attacks than the one which took place against Twitter.

For the moment the social networks seem to be of particular interest for hackers and electronic thugs but going forward expect more emphasis on ecommerce, banking and areas like the smartgrid which have the ability to inflict even greater damage than traditional social network takedowns.

Dear readers, as you likely know, ITEXPO and the numerous collocated events with this event have been generating more and more attendance at a time when many shows have seen traffic drop precipitously. What will ITEXPO in Miami look like January 20-22 in 2010?

Here is a reminder of what happened last year - thanks to you the attendance was up 15%.

Thanks once again to you, the good news is the 2010 show is about one month away and the show hotel room block at the Loews is already sold out at 106%.